NBC News Reports:
PARIS — Doomed AirAsia Flight 8501 was likely horizontal when it crashed into the sea and its impact was probably "not very violent," an expert told NBC News.
The size of debris and the state of the victims recovered suggests the jet may have glided into the water, according to Jean-Paul Troadec, who was in charge of the official French air accident investigation agency at the time of the Air France 447 crash.
"The pieces of the aircraft are not so fragmented, it's quite large pieces," he said. "The fact that the bodies seem intact means most probably that the impact was not very violent and that the airplane was probably horizontal when it crashed into the sea."
His comments came as a U.S. Navy ship helping the international search effort spotted objects that could be pieces of debris from the Airbus A320, which crashed off the coast of Borneo on Dec. 28 with 162 people on board.
The U.S.S. Fort Worth found the objects on the sea floor and was attempting to identify them, Indonesia's search and rescue chief Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo told a news conference at 7 p.m. local time (7 a.m. ET) Tuesday.